We were thrilled to see Delainey Hayles return this season in The Vampire Lestat, reprising her role as Claudia and playing a new character, Regina. While Claudia could always potentially return, if we see Hayles again in The Vampire Lestat series, it’ll probably be in the form of Regina. Regina, of course, is the human waitress whom Armand sent careening into Louis’ path as part of his revenge for his perception of the wrongs Louis dealt him. But in The Vampire Lestat finale, Armand puts Regina through true trauma, forcing her to slit her own wrist and nearly bleed out. The last time we see Hayles’ Regina, she’s running out of the room Louis and Armand are in, and rightfully so. But will Regina return again in The Vampire Lestat? Delainey Hayles reveals to us that Regina is still thinking about Louis and how he saved her life after The Vampire Lestat‘s finale, so the answer to that question feels to us like it lives between a solid “maybe” and a potential “probably.”
When we ask Delainey Hayles if Regina has officially washed her hands of vampires or she’s still thinking about Louis and the relationship between them, Hayles had this to say: “I think it’s both. Yeah, I think we saw her leg it out of the room, and I think in her mind she was like, ‘I need to get out of here.’ But I don’t think it’s escaped from her mind that Louis was doing everything he could in the room to try to save her. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, I don’t know, she goes back to waitressing, and then she’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. I wonder what he’s up to.'”
And that’s a dangerous line of thought for Regina to consider in The Vampire Lestat‘s world, but a promising one for us and other fans of Delainey Hayles. Hayles concludes our discussion by offering, “It’s a crazy story. She’ll tell it to people, and nobody believes it. So, who knows?”
We know that loneliness can drive vampires to madness, but this kind of secret knowledge is probably enough to isolate a human as well. Will Regina’s new awareness of vampire-kind drive her back into Louis’ orbit and bring Delainey Hayles back onto our screens in The Vampire Lestat? We can only hope so.
If you want to catch Delainey Hayles as Regina, The Vampire Lestat is now streaming on AMC and AMC+. If you’d like more insights into the season, you can also pick up The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice for your reading pleasure.
Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She cannot possibly wait two more years for more of the The Vampire Lestat.
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